ffabschriftingriftenwerke aka griftergetawayvehiklismus

The moment you are no longer authentic you become... the one... the only... King of the Grifters!

"The moment you stand up in front of people you are no longer authentic." @KennethGoldsmith #RISD: image via Sarah Kruse @Petite_Flaneur, 23 October 2014

Post-Internet
Poetry Refuses To Act Its Age and Nobody Cares or Notices: Privileged
Academic Practitioner Finds Self Irresistible All the Same: The New
Yorker, 10 March 2015

I
am a fraud. I manipulate. These are conceptual statements about myself.
I am making them. I brought the poetry of cruelty into
the twenty-first century. I do not announce or
foreground its methodology. I just do what I do. Doesn’t everybody make
poetry from the Web?
So what? I am now holding a big soft white towel. When I stand in front
of large numbers of white dummies in clean, well-lit performing
spaces at elite universities, I slowly fold one corner of the big soft
white towel at a time, then I slowly wrap the prone head of each person
in my audience perfectly, so that the
package no longer looks like a head, but like something square and
misshapen, more like a box maybe, but not really, in fact it's the kind of
shape which doesn’t call any particular object to
mind: if there’s a generic form of a generic item, it’s about the size
and shape of a head, but wrapped up. It might be my head, but it's
probably not, because, as you can see, my head is attached to my body
right now, saying these things, and every word I say is the result of a
Google search.

Kenneth
Goldsmith’s latest book is “Seven Trillion Excruciating Characters
Typed In One Year.” He teaches poetry and poetics at the site of the former University of
Pennsylvania

This
past weekend, at a conference called Interrupt 3 at Brown University,
poet Kenneth Goldstein read Michael Brown’s St. Louis County autopsy
report as a poem. Goldsmith is known for his conceptual, "uncreative
writing" practices, which involve working exclusively with preexisting
texts --
altering them, remixing them, appropriating and repurposing them without
credit to the original sources. This was the substance of his
performance on Friday night in Providence: he read a remixed and
slightly altered version of the official autopsy report for Brown, the
teenager killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri, last summer.
Goldsmith called his new poem “The Body of Michael Brown.”

“There were some brief announcements and then Goldsmith got on stage,” artist Faith Holland,
who happened to attend the Friday night presentation, told
Hyperallergic. “He said [the poem] was something to do with quantified
self, but otherwise there were very few introductory remarks. His
reading was unemotional and relatively even and his feet moved
rhythmically the entire time.”

Goldsmith read for roughly 30 minutes, and Holland said she didn’t
realize he’d reordered the report until he reached the end. “It appeared
that Goldsmith had just read the autopsy report in its entirety but the
last line was, ‘The remaining male genitalia system is unremarkable.’
This was striking to me, and another audience member questioned why the
performance ended on that,” Holland said.” Later I looked at the autopsy
report online and realized that he had rearranged the material; in the
original, reports of the Cranial Cavity, Spinal Cord, and Special
Studies/Specimens Obtained follow. I remember distinctly that Cranial
Cavity was read (particularly because of the line ‘The weight of the
unfixed brain is 1350 gm’) as was Special Studies/Specimens Obtained
somewhere earlier in the reading.”

According to Holland, the audience at the event was fairly small,
perhaps around 75 people, and reactions to the reading were fairly
subdued. A scheduled panel followed, but “it was clear that the
[speakers] were caught off guard by what had preceded,” she explained.
“Then the floor was opened up to the audience, who mostly offered mild
criticism but repeatedly thanked Goldsmith for ‘bringing up this
discussion.’ There was one woman who made an impassioned comment about
how this was a ‘spectacle’ and it needed to be made meaningful in order
to justify happening. She too thanked Goldsmith. The audience applauded.
But the audience was mostly quiet, panelist Ian Hatcher remarked that
he was uncomfortable going forward with what he had planned, and one of
the organizers of Interrupt 3 finally suggested ending the event early.”

Despite the relatively small audience size and reaction, word of
Goldsmith’s performance soon spread online, where people were much more
vocal and angry, condemning Goldsmith for racist exploitation in the
name of conceptual poetics...

The
conversation surrounding Goldsmith’s performance ties into a
larger one about the racial and ethical realities of conceptual
poetry (Interrupt’s subtitle is “A Discussion Forum and Studio for New
Forms of Language Art”). An anonymous group called the Mongrel Coalition
has recently begun questioning the "colonial aesthetics" of conceptual
art, and in response to the Goldsmith incident this weekend wrote a
missive on its website. It includes this passage:

On Friday night -- in what was clearly an attempt to salvage
the corpse of “conceptualism” -- Goldsmith made explicit a slippage that
we (and others) have been bemoaning for years:

The Murdered Body of Mike Brown’s Medical Report is not our poetry,
it’s the building blocks of white supremacy, a miscreant DNA infecting
everyone in the world. We refuse to let it be made “literary”

Goldsmith cannot differentiate between White Supremacy and Poetry. In fact, for so many the two are one and the same.

On
her own website, writer Jacqueline Valencia, who calls herself a friend
and mentee of Goldsmith, offered more measured but still critical
response:

Scaling back, I have to think about the poet as a vessel
of messages. In this case, Goldsmith is the vessel of the data of the
autopsy report. …

Now think of Goldsmith again as the vessel of that report. He is not
black. He is not from Ferguson. He is not related to Michael Brown. Did
he speak to the Brown’s relatives? If he didn’t are we to think that
Brown’s death, because of that freely available autopsy report, are
we to believe that Brown’s body is now freely available to the public?
This is a black body that Goldsmith is rendering in his reading. That
alone is the reason that concerned me. As a mixed woman with a black
father who has had his rights (and life) questioned because of the
colour of his skin, we both grew up subtly being told that our bodies
belonged for appropriation. My Colombian dad is called negro in his homeland. I am still called negrita there as well. Negro
there isn’t just the name of a colour, but it lives on as a derogatory
term in Spanish. Slave labour is still alive and well for the blacks in
South America. Black men still face great hardships in Colombia. Black
suffering isn’t free and readily available to the public. Until the
struggle is fought by those who suffer, we as people on the outside of
it, must be allies and not silence black voices or speak over them.

Valencia goes on to say that she doesn’t think she can fully judge
what happened on Friday night until a video or transcript of the reading
is released. Unfortunately, that seems unlikely to happen. After seeing the tweet shown below (via Kit Schlüter @Dedreytnien),
Hyperallergic reached out to professor John Cayley in the Department of
Literary Arts at Brown and confirmed that the video will not be
released, at the behest of Goldsmith, who apparently said: “I am
requesting that Brown University not make public the recording of my
performance of ‘The Body of Michael Brown.’ There’s been too much pain
for many people around this and I do not wish to cause any more.”

Cayley said the school would not normally release such video footage
publicly without the consent of the guest presenter. He added, “We will
document Interrupt 3 to the best of our abilities. As far as Goldsmith’s
contribution is concerned, it’s up to him, now, what he does with his
work. He read from a text that had been transcribed to paper, but we
don’t have a copy.”

US poet defends reading of Michael Brown autopsy report as a poem:
Conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith’s attempt to reframe the report as
poetry has caused an outcry on social media: Alison Flood, The Guardian, 17 March 2015

The American poet Kenneth Goldsmith has defended himself in the wake
of heavy criticism following his reading of Michael Brown’s autopsy
report in the form of a poem on 13 March.

Goldsmith, who has published 10 books of poetry and
teaches writing at the University of Pennsylvania, performed “The Body
of Michael Brown” at Interrupt 3, a weekend-long arts event at Brown
University. Brown was the unarmed black 18-year-old fatally shot last
summer in Ferguson, Missouri, by a white police officer.

The artist Faith Holland, who attended Goldsmith’s reading, wrote on
Twitter on Friday: “Just saw Kenneth Goldsmith read Michael Brown’s
autopsy report for 30 minutes and no one knew wtf to do with that.”

She told arts site Hyperallergic:
“There were some brief announcements and then Goldsmith got on stage.
He said [the poem]was something to do with quantified self, but
otherwise there were very few introductory remarks. His reading was
unemotional and relatively even and his feet moved rhythmically the
entire time.”

Goldsmith
is a conceptual poet known for what he calls uncreative
writing. His book Seven Trillion Tiny American Deaths Occur in Each
Second of Every One of My Unendurable Academic Performances is a
transcription
of quotes from radio and television reports of national tragedies,
including the shooting of John F Kennedy, forming a series of prose
poems. “It knocks the dust off your family jewels, yet,” enthused The
New York Times in a review.

According
to Holland, following his reading, the small audience of
around 75 people “mostly offered mild criticism but repeatedly thanked
Goldsmith for ‘bringing up this discussion’”. Hypocrisy is known to be
reaching epidemic proportions in American academia currently.

Once
news of Goldsmith’s reading hit the internet, however, the
reaction was less muted. Author and Bad Feminist essayist Roxane Gay
called it “tacky” on Twitter, highlighting “the audacity of reading an
autopsy report and calling it poetry”. The writer and professor Cathy
Park Hong tweeted: “Kenneth Goldsmith has reached new racist lows yet
elite institutions continue to pay him guest speaker fees”.

“For Kenneth Goldsmith to stand on stage, and not be aware that his
body -- his white male body, a body that is a symbol loaded with a
history of oppression, of literal dominance and ownership of black
bodies -- is a part of the performance, then he has failed to notice
something drastically important about the ‘contextualization’ of this
work,” wrote PE Garcia
on the online arts magazine Queen’s Mob. “If, as he says, we are to
look at this as conceptual art -– if we are to believe the audience is in
charge of this interpretation -– then Goldsmith should accept the
context of his performance. He should accept the pain his audience felt.
He should accept that we might look at him and only see another white
man holding the corpse of a black child saying, ‘Look at what I’ve
made’.”

“To be clear, Michael Brown’s autopsy report was powerful,” tweeted
Holland. “It was also obviously problematic & I’m willing to bet
intentionally so -- white man claiming this as ‘his new poem’ in white
dominated space. But pairing graphic description of wounds with
graduation photo of Michael Brown made it also an empathetic and
political gesture.” She added that it was “not entirely” successful, as
the “audience was happy it ‘raised issues’ but then was basically unable
to discuss & event concluded early.”

Goldsmith himself retweeted angry responses to his reading –- “Kenneth
Goldsmith: art is not white appropriation of Black suffering. I condemn
your cruel reading of Michael Brown’s autopsy report” –- also reporting with muffled sob
that he had received a death threat on Sunday morning before posting a lengthy explanation of his actions on Facebook.

"The elaborate 'explanation' on Facebook -- perfect. Just like Kenny! Work it!"

The
work, Goldsmith said, was “in the tradition” of his previous book Seven Trillion Tiny American Deaths Occur in Each Second of Every One of My Unendurable Academic Performances. “I took a publicly available document
from an American tragedy that was witnessed first-hand (in this case by
the doctor performing the autopsy) and simply read it. This is like my shtick, you know? Like with Seven Trillion Tiny American Deaths,
I did not editorialize; I simply read it
without commentary or additional editorializing, or, for that matter,
editorializing -- have I mentioned I don't editorialize?” he wrote. “The
document I read from is powerful. My reading of it was even more
powerful. How
could it be otherwise? Such is my long-standing practice of conceptual
writing: like Seven Trillion Tiny American Deaths, the document speaks
for itself in ways that an interpretation cannot. That's why I'm explaining it. It is a horrific
American document, but then again it was a horrific American death, and I am a truly horrific fake, really.”

Goldsmith added that he “altered the text for poetic effect”,
translating medical terms into plain English and “narrativi[sing]” the
words “in ways that made the text less didactic and more literary”.

“I indeed stated at the beginning of my reading that this was a poem
called The Body of Michael Brown; I never stated, ‘I am going to read
the autopsy report of Michael Brown’,” he wrote. “That said, I didn’t
add or alter a single word or sentiment that did not preexist in the
original text, for to do so would be to go against my nearly three
decades’ practice of conceptual writing, one that states that a writer
need not write any new texts but rather reframe those that already exist
in the world to greater effect than any subjective interpretation could
lend. Perhaps people feel uncomfortable with my uncreative writing, but
for me, this is the writing that is able to tell the truth in the
strongest and clearest way possible.”

He ended his explanation with the line “Ecce homo. Behold the man”,
the words used by Pontius Pilate when presenting Christ to the crowds
before his death, later adding a follow-up Facebook post in which he
said that he had asked Brown University not to make the recording of his
performance of the poem public.

"As
of this performance, to which I've of course already claimed copyright,
I now own exclusive world literary rights to the Michael Brown autopsy
report," he added. "If anybody's got a problem with that, their people
should talk to my people. Monday would be good for us, but I'm always
flexible, I've usually got several slots open, even on short notice,
provided of course the numbers look right to us."

ffabschriftingriften -- at it again

Speakers specializing in poetry, fine arts and
literary studies gathered at the Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the
Creative Arts this weekend to explore the impact of digital culture at
the third “Interrupt” conference. But these conversations were largely
displaced by controversy over poet Kenneth Goldsmith’s performance of a
poem that uses text from Michael Brown’s autopsy report.

The conference focused in part on
“uncreative writing” -- the poetic style pioneered by Goldsmith, who
attended the Rhode Island School of Design, teaches poetics and poetic
practice at Penn and was named the Museum of Modern Art’s first Poet
Laureate.

With the unprecedented number of texts
available in the digital age, Goldsmith focuses on refashioning
preexisting texts instead of creating new ones. During his Friday night
performance entitled “The Body of Michael Brown,” Goldsmith used the
preexisting text of Michael Brown’s autopsy report.

Goldsmith projected an image of Brown’s
high school graduation photo and recited the autopsy report with only
slight alterations, changing the order of the text and translating the
medical vocabulary into layperson’s terms. He detailed explicit images
from the report, notably the entry and exit wounds of the bullets, and
ended the piece with the autopsy’s description of Brown’s genitals as
“unremarkable.”

Many audience members and other
performers felt “profoundly uncomfortable” following Goldsmith’s
performance, said co-organizer Francesca Capone GS, who is studying
literary arts. Two other scheduled performers expressed reluctance to
present, and so organizers decided to end the event early, Capone said.

Many conference attendees criticized
Goldsmith, a white male, for appropriating a black body for his poetry,
thereby aestheticizing racial violence.

“As much as 20th century art and
literature would like to promote the erasure of the author, as Goldsmith
does, he is enacting a history of violence and appropriation of
marginalized bodies,” said Rachel Ossip ’15, a fifth-year student in the
Dual Degree program.

“This is linked to an author’s position
and privilege, which cannot be ignored,” Ossip added. “Art should never
be an excuse for racial violence.”

Goldsmith chose not to participate in the
discussion following his performance, said John Cayley, co-organizer of
the conference and professor of literary arts.

One performer began and then stopped her
performance, walking off stage while saying “Never mind, I don’t know
what I was thinking,” Ossip said.

Audience members’ reactions during the
discussion ranged from mild critique to anger and condemnation, she
said.

Cayley and Capone said they had no prior
knowledge of the content of Goldsmith’s performance, as they did not
screen the text beforehand. They added that they believed they should
place “confidence and trust” in all of the artists attending the
conference, including Goldsmith.

Cayley wrote in an email to Goldsmith,
“neither ‘Interrupt 3’ nor Brown was in any way responsible for your
choice of performance or for the reception of what you chose to
perform.”

Criticism of Goldsmith’s performance
erupted on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter in the
wake of the event. Goldsmith tweeted that he had even received a death
threat.

In a March 15 Facebook post defending his
piece, Goldsmith wrote, “It is a horrific American document, but then
again it was a horrific American death.”

The absence of “editorializing” allows a
document to speak “for itself in ways that an interpretation cannot,”
Goldsmith also wrote on Facebook.

As the controversy further ignited
online, Goldsmith wrote on Facebook Tuesday that he requests that “Brown
University not make public the recording of my performance … There’s
been too much pain for many people around this and I do not wish to
cause any more.”

Saturday’s scheduled events proceeded as
planned and included a presentation on “ffabschrifting,” a new artistic
movement that brings attention to the form in which texts are presented.
The day also included a presentation from Johanna Drucker, professor of
bibliographical studies in the department of information studies at the
University of California, Los Angeles.

The conference concluded Sunday with an
open discussion that included prepared responses from attendees. In the
wide-ranging conversation, Goldsmith’s performance became a jumping-off
point for a discussion of underrepresentation of people of color in
poetry, fine arts, higher education and the “Interrupt” conference
itself. Despite “tremendous efforts to diversify the program,”
organizers’ inability to do so reflects the issues of diversity in the
arts, Cayley said.

3 comments:

Expected no comments on this. After all why would anyone outside a cabal of mutually interested fakers want to attempt to defend their cabal -- they don't have to, after all. Nobody's taking their perks away.

The usual weak kneed back channel responses dribbling in on this, nobody of course saying anything -- why would those compromised by the need to remain or become pertinent on the scene want to dare getting caught saying anything in public about one of the pinhead kingpins.

One guy who's been publishing Goldschumutt for years and says he totally loves him and remains an enthusiastic supporter no matter what ($$$$$ talks!), writes, evidently in defense of the fact Goldschmutt can't write poetry, [he] "doesn't particularly like poetry", which I found interesting -- a guy enriching himself off exploiting a medium he doesn't particularly like. Now if he'd have the nerve to find something he absolutely hates, and exploit that -- snickering and sneering with smug superiority all the way to the bank -- that might begin to get interesting. Requiring a little injection of... what, energy, maybe? But no, just the same boring superior continuum of b.s., weak shots at soft (The New York Times) or dead (Mike Brown) targets...the easiest of the easy, for the easiest of all crowds, the already bored-to-death bought-situation inmates of the arts industry bubble.

Small wonder the splash of a big ambition fish in a small pond hasn't made larger waves -- Geltschmuck's an embarrassment to everybody but his vast network of limp schleppers.

No reason why anyone who doesn't hold shares in the moribund arts industry in this dying empire should wish to be involved in it, anyway.

And a word to the timid souls who troll the backwaters -- next time save the secret sharing, puh- leeze!

It's just more sharing of Nothing.

It's impossible to say anything about a bubble from inside the bubble.

There's a great bit in the recent Adam Curtis documentary where some young British Council tutor (fresh from her masters) tries to persuade a group of Afghan students of the value of Duchamp's urinal. Not sure if it's accessible in the US.

First, to get the chaff out of the way, there are people who might have been disposed to take KG's totally disingenuous anxious whiteboy blubbering about death threats seriously, this article ought provide some palliative care:

And then -- yes. Variations on the Duchamp urinal now seem to be a necessary starter-kit portfolio item in the standard-uniform trick box of art fakery. One replica in every university art museum everywhere on earth.

As to your point about the aestheticization of politics -- my attempt at a reply turned into this.

You're a better reader than I am a reader or writer, nobody is good enough to deserve nor should be vain enough not to appreciate that.